"But at the time Xerox patented this the infrastructure we take for granted in terms of wifi, and location protocols didn't exist. Indeed that's probably exactly what was envisioned in the patent."
OMG, you too? Just type "US Patent 6122520" into google.
"The GPS receiving system receives a signal from the GPS and converts it into a coordinate entry. The coordinate entry is transmitted to the distributed network for retrieval of corresponding location specific information. The location specific information may reside on a web page."
The patent seems pretty damb specific to me. And I read all the quoted refs it links to, and searched up similar hits in the DB. They cover different methods of locating the cell phone, including tower triangulation and such, others cover TCP/IP from cell phones, and other cover various ways of doing geolookups. However, none of them combine the two ideas in this fashion -- for instance, one Hitachi patent talks about the same basic idea, but couches it in terms of product lookup in a warehouse, while another talks about pre-recorded information stored in the device itself.
I'm sorry, but writing this off as "bad patent" will do nothing by hurt any claims that the system is broken.
OMG, read the patent! Sheesh, they even linked to it so it was ONLY ONE CLICK AWAY. And you still didn't bother!
The patent does NOT cover location determination, so your entire argument is moon. It DOES cover the combination of location information with the on-line lookup of relevant information. To whit:
"The coordinate entry is transmitted to the distributed network for retrieval of corresponding location specific information. The location specific information may reside on a web page."
The patent dates to 1998, so I seriously doubt that there's prior art. Certainly the mobile networks simply did not exist, and the web itself was still getting started. There's certainly examples of geotagged DB systems from this era, but I don't recall one being used to do web queries.
This looks exactly as nuclear as the pundits are saying.
> The US currently has enough warheads to destroy the world several hundred times over > which would be ash and dust and a few scraps of metal
Hmmm, let's use math instead of guesses.
The area of "complete distraction" effect of a modern warhead is about 3 miles radius. The area of the Great Britain is about 90,000 square miles, so that means we would need 30,000 nuclear warheads to destroy the UK to the level you're talking about. For the US you would need over 1 million warheads.
> face it, this stone's been turned, and it can't be turned back. even if we abandon nuclear weapons today, > the knowledge exists to make them again (as it should - to ignore all of nuclear physics would be a bad idea).
The same is true for crossbows, but I don't see anyone rushing to equip armies with them. And before you say it's not the same thing, you need to go and examine the history of the crossbow, because it absolutely was the atomic bomb of its era. So basically I think this is a terrible argument.
The Bomb is an outdated weapon. The same is true of MBT's, heavy SP artillery and many other weapon systems. We're already at the point where a weapon that can't be carried on a Twin Huey is a useless weapon - so the M777 and Hummer-based drones are much, much more valuable than the Crusader and Abrams. And as that evolution continues, I suspect the war of the future is going to look more like stuxnet and less like The Bulge, and that evolution will continue. It will continue to be bloody, ever more so, but the way that damage will be delivered with be with precision, not area effects. The Bomb is the ultimate area effect weapon.
And that's assuming the war that the US next fights won't be on the balance sheet rather than in the skies. I believe all evidence suggests this is the real threat and that spending time and effort worrying about the atomic maginot line weakens the US's attempts to move into the future.
> nominal deterrent is needed as well. the USA's policy of consolidating, simplifying and idiot-proofing it's arsenal
It's not a bad idea, by any means. Cheap too.
There is the question of how many weapons are needed, and also the conversation about demasting them. It seems entirely reasonable to me that 50 strategic warheads kept in secure off-site storage (as opposed to mounted in missiles) is just as much a deterrent as 10000 warheads ready for 10 minute launch. And not just today, in the 1960s as well.
Removing them from the missile would be a clear message to the world that the US does not consider other people a threat to their existence (which is the case) as well as provide another level of escalation (or sabre rattling if you prefer) that doesn't exist now.
> large numbers of people unable to be supported by non-oil-based agricultural methods
Looking over the numbers, this does not appear to be an issue.
The practical way to fix problems is to start with the biggest ones. The biggest ones in this case, as clearly shown on the graph, are "liquid" and "solid", namely fuels for transport and coal for electricity. Both of these are solvable, now. Unfortunately the solution to the first, PEH's and hybrid semis, *may* require more base load depending on where you live. And that means the second will likely require a massive nuclear buildout, but we don't really have that much uranium, and the hurdles to building remain huge.
So instead we'll keep doing what we're doing now, continue a buildout of low-impact systems like wind and solar, and use the slow buildout as an excuse not to demand radical action on closing plants or demanding widespread adoption of PEHs.
> Weird, I see imaginary friend as the simpler explanation
Not the same definition of "simpler". When discussing Occam's razor, "simpler" means "less things involved."
For instance, sun rises, could be due to motion of the Earth, could be due to the rotation of the Earth due to a guy who throws thunderbolts and lives on a mountain in Greece.
Occam's razor notes that the second of these two includes an extra factor that is not needed, and therefore is more likely to be wrong. Not wrong, but more likely. In the real world, "more likely" is a number very close to 100%
"Are you certain that we don't have to worry about the globe getting more solar energy than it is already getting"
Yes. The difference would be minor fractions of fractions of a percent. Don't forget, if it's sunny where you are there's 1000 watts falling on the circle made by your arms. We're talking about beaming a reasonable multiple of that amount down to Earth. *That*, at least, is not an issue.
> Typical comms satellites last 20 years if they survive launch
Solar panels are rated using a standard based on 20% loss. For ground based panels, the warrantee is at 25 years, meaning that 25 years from now the panels will still be producing 80% of their rated power, or you get a free panel. In fact, the panels appear to last much longer than that, and current estimates are 40 to 60 years - we don't know, because we only started building them 40 years ago, and those that weren't scrapped are still pumping.
In space the same lifetime point is 12 years. So lets say a given panel makes it to 20 years in space. That means that the same panel would have lasted to 45 years on the ground, all things being equal.
Nothing could be further from the truth! Look up "Kessler syndrome" and read the article on space debris on the Wiki. Don Kessler passed some materials on to me that predicted the average lifetime of a SPS would be on the order of a year, or less.
Fine, if you believe this, run the same equations and tell me what you think will happen.
But honestly, why don't you just say "well, when I wave my magic wand, it will look different". One can imagine all sorts of science fiction solutions to this problem, but, and this is critical, one can also imagine all sorts of science fiction solutions to making the same power cheaper hear on earth. For instance, if we invent a low cost superconductor we could ship power from north africa across the Atlantic. Right?
Now stop and ask yourself this: is more money being spent on space elevators, or cheap superconductors? More generally, is more money being spent on improving access to space, or all of the other technological advances that would improve solar collection in general? The answer is that the later is always, by definition, greater than the first. So ground based power will *always* be cheaper. Period.
As I said in the article, if you don't believe the numbers RUN YOUR OWN.
The fact that it can only be used in enterprise by buying a second device is moronic. Don't try to be RIMs apologist, you simply make yourself look silly. This product is a failure, and the sales figures back that up.
"As for the PlayBook market -- you do realize it was marketed to BlackBerry users. The tagline was "Your BlackBerry, Amplified" It was made very clear that the PlayBook was designed to work in tandem with a BlackBerry phone."
Uggg. This is precisely why it was doomed. The BB market is *shrinking*, so why would you possibly tie it in?!
I don't have a BB, so I don't buy a PB. This is a marketing plan? Or a failure plan?
Did we learn nothing from the Unix Wars? Tie-in kills companies. Customers *hate* it. If anything is going to bring down Apple, it's this.
"The costs include the mounting structure and the power inverter."
This is called "Balance of System", or BOS. Right now it breaks down roughly like this:
$1.25 for the panels $0.40 for the inverters $0.30 for the racking and install
This is for small systems, larger systems reduce that roughly linearly by 30 to 50%.
So if you're trying to reduce the cost of solar, clearly hitting the panel cost is the way to go. For instance, if the panels drop in price by 1/2, then the total system cost goes from $1.95 to $1.33. If you reduce the cost of inverters by 1/2, the cost goes from $1.85 to $1.75. Which would you prefer?
Um no. The article is clearly talking about LCoE, the basis upon which all industrial power pricing is compared.
> Besides the hard facts (cents per kW under STC, usually called kWp or kW peak) that number also includes > projections about the longevity of the cells and the environmental conditions of their use, > which are wide open to manipulation.
If that were the number they were referring to, you might have a point. But it's not, and you're wrong anyway. STC measurements are normally done at 3rd party labs for just this reason.
As the cost of hybrid batteries plummets, engines will increasingly run at set power levels for long periods of time. The right engine for this role is debatable, but it's almost certainly a turbine, or less possibly a stirling. They run on any fuel, have excellent economy, and have problems primarily with throttling - which isn't a problem on a hybrid. Investing in new conventional piston technology is a waste.
Slashdot Mirror
"But at the time Xerox patented this the infrastructure we take for granted in terms of wifi, and location protocols didn't exist. Indeed that's probably exactly what was envisioned in the patent."
OMG, you too? Just type "US Patent 6122520" into google.
"The GPS receiving system receives a signal from the GPS and converts it into a coordinate entry. The coordinate entry is transmitted to the distributed network for retrieval of corresponding location specific information. The location specific information may reside on a web page."
The patent seems pretty damb specific to me. And I read all the quoted refs it links to, and searched up similar hits in the DB. They cover different methods of locating the cell phone, including tower triangulation and such, others cover TCP/IP from cell phones, and other cover various ways of doing geolookups. However, none of them combine the two ideas in this fashion -- for instance, one Hitachi patent talks about the same basic idea, but couches it in terms of product lookup in a warehouse, while another talks about pre-recorded information stored in the device itself.
I'm sorry, but writing this off as "bad patent" will do nothing by hurt any claims that the system is broken.
OMG, read the patent! Sheesh, they even linked to it so it was ONLY ONE CLICK AWAY. And you still didn't bother!
The patent does NOT cover location determination, so your entire argument is moon. It DOES cover the combination of location information with the on-line lookup of relevant information. To whit:
"The coordinate entry is transmitted to the distributed network for retrieval of corresponding location specific information. The location specific information may reside on a web page."
The patent dates to 1998, so I seriously doubt that there's prior art. Certainly the mobile networks simply did not exist, and the web itself was still getting started. There's certainly examples of geotagged DB systems from this era, but I don't recall one being used to do web queries.
This looks exactly as nuclear as the pundits are saying.
> The US currently has enough warheads to destroy the world several hundred times over
> which would be ash and dust and a few scraps of metal
Hmmm, let's use math instead of guesses.
The area of "complete distraction" effect of a modern warhead is about 3 miles radius. The area of the Great Britain is about 90,000 square miles, so that means we would need 30,000 nuclear warheads to destroy the UK to the level you're talking about. For the US you would need over 1 million warheads.
So, you're wrong.
> face it, this stone's been turned, and it can't be turned back. even if we abandon nuclear weapons today,
> the knowledge exists to make them again (as it should - to ignore all of nuclear physics would be a bad idea).
The same is true for crossbows, but I don't see anyone rushing to equip armies with them. And before you say it's not the same thing, you need to go and examine the history of the crossbow, because it absolutely was the atomic bomb of its era. So basically I think this is a terrible argument.
The Bomb is an outdated weapon. The same is true of MBT's, heavy SP artillery and many other weapon systems. We're already at the point where a weapon that can't be carried on a Twin Huey is a useless weapon - so the M777 and Hummer-based drones are much, much more valuable than the Crusader and Abrams. And as that evolution continues, I suspect the war of the future is going to look more like stuxnet and less like The Bulge, and that evolution will continue. It will continue to be bloody, ever more so, but the way that damage will be delivered with be with precision, not area effects. The Bomb is the ultimate area effect weapon.
And that's assuming the war that the US next fights won't be on the balance sheet rather than in the skies. I believe all evidence suggests this is the real threat and that spending time and effort worrying about the atomic maginot line weakens the US's attempts to move into the future.
> nominal deterrent is needed as well. the USA's policy of consolidating, simplifying and idiot-proofing it's arsenal
It's not a bad idea, by any means. Cheap too.
There is the question of how many weapons are needed, and also the conversation about demasting them. It seems entirely reasonable to me that 50 strategic warheads kept in secure off-site storage (as opposed to mounted in missiles) is just as much a deterrent as 10000 warheads ready for 10 minute launch. And not just today, in the 1960s as well.
Removing them from the missile would be a clear message to the world that the US does not consider other people a threat to their existence (which is the case) as well as provide another level of escalation (or sabre rattling if you prefer) that doesn't exist now.
Wow, two jokes in one!
> large numbers of people unable to be supported by non-oil-based agricultural methods
Looking over the numbers, this does not appear to be an issue.
The practical way to fix problems is to start with the biggest ones. The biggest ones in this case, as clearly shown on the graph, are "liquid" and "solid", namely fuels for transport and coal for electricity. Both of these are solvable, now. Unfortunately the solution to the first, PEH's and hybrid semis, *may* require more base load depending on where you live. And that means the second will likely require a massive nuclear buildout, but we don't really have that much uranium, and the hurdles to building remain huge.
So instead we'll keep doing what we're doing now, continue a buildout of low-impact systems like wind and solar, and use the slow buildout as an excuse not to demand radical action on closing plants or demanding widespread adoption of PEHs.
Maybe, maybe not.
Try entering a reminder or schedule item by hand.
Now try the same thing in Siri.
YMMV, but that seems like a major improvement to me.
> Weird, I see imaginary friend as the simpler explanation
Not the same definition of "simpler". When discussing Occam's razor, "simpler" means "less things involved."
For instance, sun rises, could be due to motion of the Earth, could be due to the rotation of the Earth due to a guy who throws thunderbolts and lives on a mountain in Greece.
Occam's razor notes that the second of these two includes an extra factor that is not needed, and therefore is more likely to be wrong. Not wrong, but more likely. In the real world, "more likely" is a number very close to 100%
"Are you certain that we don't have to worry about the globe getting more solar energy than it is already getting"
Yes. The difference would be minor fractions of fractions of a percent. Don't forget, if it's sunny where you are there's 1000 watts falling on the circle made by your arms. We're talking about beaming a reasonable multiple of that amount down to Earth. *That*, at least, is not an issue.
> Typical comms satellites last 20 years if they survive launch
Solar panels are rated using a standard based on 20% loss. For ground based panels, the warrantee is at 25 years, meaning that 25 years from now the panels will still be producing 80% of their rated power, or you get a free panel. In fact, the panels appear to last much longer than that, and current estimates are 40 to 60 years - we don't know, because we only started building them 40 years ago, and those that weren't scrapped are still pumping.
In space the same lifetime point is 12 years. So lets say a given panel makes it to 20 years in space. That means that the same panel would have lasted to 45 years on the ground, all things being equal.
Here's some data points:
http://www.windows2universe.org/spaceweather/damage_solar_panels.html
> Space is actually a fairly benign environment
Nothing could be further from the truth! Look up "Kessler syndrome" and read the article on space debris on the Wiki. Don Kessler passed some materials on to me that predicted the average lifetime of a SPS would be on the order of a year, or less.
Fine, if you believe this, run the same equations and tell me what you think will happen.
But honestly, why don't you just say "well, when I wave my magic wand, it will look different". One can imagine all sorts of science fiction solutions to this problem, but, and this is critical, one can also imagine all sorts of science fiction solutions to making the same power cheaper hear on earth. For instance, if we invent a low cost superconductor we could ship power from north africa across the Atlantic. Right?
Now stop and ask yourself this: is more money being spent on space elevators, or cheap superconductors? More generally, is more money being spent on improving access to space, or all of the other technological advances that would improve solar collection in general? The answer is that the later is always, by definition, greater than the first. So ground based power will *always* be cheaper. Period.
As I said in the article, if you don't believe the numbers RUN YOUR OWN.
> 's all because BBM is tightly tied to internal elements of the cell phone network
Didn't phase Apple. iMessage works great on iPads.
> My guess is network backbone software upgrades
It was a hardware failure, as well documented in the press.
> You are in serious denial.
Seriously.
"I'm not sure that RIM marketed the PlayBook to any significant degree to the consumer market"
Oh give me a break.
http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/09/30/rim.divided.on.playbook.focus.on.home.pro.users/
The fact that it can only be used in enterprise by buying a second device is moronic. Don't try to be RIMs apologist, you simply make yourself look silly. This product is a failure, and the sales figures back that up.
"As for the PlayBook market -- you do realize it was marketed to BlackBerry users. The tagline was "Your BlackBerry, Amplified" It was made very clear that the PlayBook was designed to work in tandem with a BlackBerry phone."
Uggg. This is precisely why it was doomed. The BB market is *shrinking*, so why would you possibly tie it in?!
I don't have a BB, so I don't buy a PB. This is a marketing plan? Or a failure plan?
Did we learn nothing from the Unix Wars? Tie-in kills companies. Customers *hate* it. If anything is going to bring down Apple, it's this.
"The costs include the mounting structure and the power inverter."
This is called "Balance of System", or BOS. Right now it breaks down roughly like this:
$1.25 for the panels
$0.40 for the inverters
$0.30 for the racking and install
This is for small systems, larger systems reduce that roughly linearly by 30 to 50%.
So if you're trying to reduce the cost of solar, clearly hitting the panel cost is the way to go. For instance, if the panels drop in price by 1/2, then the total system cost goes from $1.95 to $1.33. If you reduce the cost of inverters by 1/2, the cost goes from $1.85 to $1.75. Which would you prefer?
This will never, ever work. Even in theory.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/the-maury-equation/
> That's still a mostly bogus number.
Um no. The article is clearly talking about LCoE, the basis upon which all industrial power pricing is compared.
> Besides the hard facts (cents per kW under STC, usually called kWp or kW peak) that number also includes
> projections about the longevity of the cells and the environmental conditions of their use,
> which are wide open to manipulation.
If that were the number they were referring to, you might have a point. But it's not, and you're wrong anyway. STC measurements are normally done at 3rd party labs for just this reason.
Why? Once all the footage is in, take the masters (on HD one assumes) and run it all at once into a high quality film recorder. Archive that.
As the cost of hybrid batteries plummets, engines will increasingly run at set power levels for long periods of time. The right engine for this role is debatable, but it's almost certainly a turbine, or less possibly a stirling. They run on any fuel, have excellent economy, and have problems primarily with throttling - which isn't a problem on a hybrid. Investing in new conventional piston technology is a waste.
I can barely get in the door of the Apple Store in the ones I've visited in Toronto and Ottawa. They need more crowding, why?
This is a seriously stupid idea.
Why is this making it to the front page?
" days of IT organizations being forced to deploy expensive, closed RISC architectures for mission-critical applications are nearing an end"
Indeed, the days of IT organizations being forced to deploy expensive, closed, sorta-RISC is upon us! Happy days!
Try it yourself. Think of something really dangerous, like skydiving... nope. Parachute? Nope. Cougar? Nada. Macaw? You bet!
> What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?
Isn't it obvious?